Those attempts, by and large, have failed. However, whilst it was discovered not to be impossible to train a zebra to carry a person, it proved a painstaking and tedious task fraught with danger. Some zookeepers in fact, would rather take care of the lions than the striped equines, citing the former as the less dangerous job.
We know horses bite and they kick. Zebras are different. When they kick, they look behind themselves, aim and strike with purpose. They also have a charming habit of biting and not letting go until the thing they are biting is dead. Aggression is a very useful and understandable quality for life in the African savannah they call home.
They are, unfortunately, one of the favourite meals of whole prides of clawed, fanged, muscle-bound big cats and packs of savage hyenas. In order to survive, zebras have gained a major bad attitude by necessity. When in danger, they run, and when necessary, they fight. They have to be good at fighting or they die. Horses have, by comparison, an extremely tolerant disposition. They also have a far more malleable nature which allows them to adapt to new scenarios, such as having a bridle fitted for the first time, with fewer attempts to attack the person handling them.
They tolerate clumsy handling by inexperienced horsemen and women remarkably well. They may bite and kick, but they can be taught manners when they are young relatively easily and simple safety rules such as not running up behind a horse and giving it a surprise, drastically reduce the likelihood of being injured. Considering their power and the amount humans interact with horses, very few terrible accidents occur on the ground.
The majority are the result of riders losing their seat and taking a fall. Of course, a new question emerges from this: were horses born or created?
Did by process of selecting for the qualities we humans prefer — such as, animals not determined to kill us — create the placid horse akin to how wolves have been transformed into lapdogs?
Some posit the horse was simply in the right place at the right time. We humans have 5 key animals we have come to depend on:. In order to be domesticated, animals must also have these 6 main things in common:. Put all these 6 factors together and you have a species that could conceivably be domesticated. However, if just one of these factors is missing, the species is likely to never be domesticated.
Zebras, fall into this category, in a lot of ways. Just because animals huddle in groups does not mean they are family or even friends. Humans occasionally huddle in groups and for the most part we hate it. They have tried, many times in fact.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was something of a fad for taming zebras. In the midth century, George Grey imported zebras from South Africa to New Zealand, where he was taking up a governorship, to pull his carriage.
The Victorian-era zoologist Lord Walter Rothschild likewise trained zebras to pull vehicles, famously driving a zebra-drawn carriage to Buckingham Palace. And in the early 20th century, Rosendo Ribeiro, the first doctor in Nairobi, allegedly made house calls on zebraback.
Zebras were already abundant in many of the regions colonialists were penetrating; domesticating the herds would save them the expense and difficulty of importing horses. More importantly, zebras were resistant to the diseases carried by tsetse flies , diseases that were highly fatal to horses. But while one-off attempts to tame a single animal may have been successful, domesticating them—breeding captive herds specifically for human use—proved impossible.
They were easily agitated, aggressive when cornered biting and kicking so hard they could easily maim or kill a would-be rider , and bad tempered. The quick-and-dirty answer?
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